Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others – or using one’s authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf. In short, it is “knowing better but doing worse”.

— Philip Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo Quotes

At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.

— Philip Zimbardo

Yesterday was too early. Tomorrow will be too late. Today is the day of reckoning for each of us.

— Philip Zimbardo

While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

— Philip Zimbardo

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

— Philip Zimbardo

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

— Philip Zimbardo

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line between good and evil is in the center of every human heart.

— Philip Zimbardo

Added to my distress was the realization that many of the “independent” investigative reports clearly laid the blame for the abuses at the feet of senior officers.

— Philip Zimbardo

Power said to the world, “You are mine.” The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, “I am thine.” The world gave it the freedom of her house. – Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds22.

— Philip Zimbardo

A life well lived is the best antidote to that fatal truth. Be active, not a passive worrywart. Find magic in the moment, joy in making someone smile. Listen to a lover’s sigh; look into the dancing eyes of a child you made feel special. Most of all, marvel at the wonder that eons of evolutionary time and all your unique experiences have joined to comprise the symphony that is YOU.

— Philip Zimbardo

A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of Billy’s bedroom.

— Philip Zimbardo

The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the SPE shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness.

— Philip Zimbardo

Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.

— Philip Zimbardo

There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” to alter the last phrase to “but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.

— Philip Zimbardo

No one played devil’s advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy’s “disastrous” decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11.

— Philip Zimbardo

Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors,” even in good people.

— Philip Zimbardo

Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.

— Philip Zimbardo

Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.

— Philip Zimbardo

The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.

— Philip Zimbardo

Another way of looking at it is, you’re putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.

— Philip Zimbardo

Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do – given the same situational forces.

— Philip Zimbardo
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